All My Children February Sweeps

I realize it's kind of late to do an analysis of sweeps month on the ABC soaps, since we're already a full week into March, but I needed some time for it all to sink in to make some sense out of it.

I'm doing this blog in three parts, because otherwise it would just get too long.

I'm starting with All My Children for a couple different reasons. First, it was, by far, the worst of the three ABC soaps. Second, All My Children has always been "my soap" so I feel especially compelled to analyze it first.

First of all, I can't help but start with the sweeps before the sweeps, as a certain exec at AMC called it. That is, Dixie's accidental death at the hands of the Satin Slayer. You all have no idea how upsetting that was for me and basically all the fans of All My Children. We've endured a rather hellish year of Dixie being a lurker and being written completely out of character. And just as she was starting to be Dixie again, she gets killed off, for what seems like some really poor decision behind the scenes. We were promised a reunion with Tad and both of them finding their daughter Kate in the near future. The reunion with Tad took the form of him asking her out on a date the morning she died. She found out about Kate after she died. She saw Kate and Tad in the park (as a ghost, no less) and realized who Kate was. Talk about disappointing!

The majority of sweeps month, though, focused on the climax of the Satin Slayer storyline. For those that may only tune in occasionally, AMC decided to do a serial killer story to pare down the cast a bit (which was getting rather large, in my opinion). It was discovered that Zach's father, the presumed-dead Alexander Cambius, Sr., was killing off the women of Fusion to teach Zach a lesson in obedience. This is all because Zach, ne Alex, Jr., faked his own death to get out from under his father's thumb. Senior had also laid the blame of Zach's mother, Amelia's, death on Zach, even though Senior was the one that pushed her off a balcony.

While parts of this story made sense, namely the killer being related to Zach because he was going after women important to Zach's wife Kendall, most of the story seemed to be pulled out of thin air. This is not surprising, since the soon-to-be-former-head-writer admitted to launching the Madden in a box torture story without knowing who buried Madden beforehand. The fact that the killer went after women that are only connected to Zach by the thinnest of threads made absolutely no sense at all. It would have made more sense if the killer would have went after Kendall or Spike (Kendall's baby with Ryan) at first to torture Zach. All in all, it was a very ill-conceived plot device.

Then, of course, we had the faux-death of Babe. Babe was saved from the grave by her sometimes-lover Josh, because he's hopelessly devoted to Babe. (Now I have the Olivia Newton-John song stuck in my head...) So, Josh kept Babe alive, but let her family, including husband JR and pregnant mother Krystal, grieve for Babe. Josh said it was to protect her from the serial killer, but we all know that it's to keep her away from JR. This whole plot stunk to high heaven, too. Especially for those of us who aren't Babe-lovers.

Beyond those three main stories, nothing else happened during sweeps month. To say it was a lackluster sweeps month is an understatement. The only thing that redeemed some of the stories was the acting, specifically by Thorsten Kaye, Alicia Minshew, and Ronald Guttman in the climax of the Satin Slayer story.

The one good thing that happened in sweeps month is that head writer Megan McTavish was fired. Don't get me wrong, I don't like when anyone is fired, but soaps are a business, and if you're putting out a lousy product, you don't deserve to be in charge anymore.

So, that's my analysis of All My Children. The other two soaps will be covered in the following days. Please comment if you feel I've missed something or agree with me or even disagree with me. I love discussions on my soaps.